Conversations For Transformation

Essays By Laurence Platt

Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

And More

January 19, 2016

Werner
Erhard
famously
avers you never discuss
God
with someone who doesn't know the difference between their
ass and a hole in the ground. That's a very
provocative assertion. It's very confronting. It's
very ... well ... it's very
Werner.

Life is
open,
life is fluid, life is kinetic (look
out-here
and it's obvious: something's
happeningbecause everything's moving). And the
trouble
with
"The Truth"
is as soon as we figure it out (which is exactly what we're driven to
do, yes?), it becomes a closed, static, fixed version of
the real thing. That's the hazard inherent in any
conversation
about
"The Truth".
But what's crucial to distinguish here is it's a hazard which
goeswith (as
Alan Watts
may have said) any
conversation
about
"The Truth"
and yet doesn't gowith
"The Truth"
itself per se - that is to say it's we who
reduce the distinguished
"Truth"
to closed, static, fixed, dry concepts and
beliefs.

It's a trap. It's
natural
for us
human beings
to want to inquire into
"The Truth".
And yet in so doing, we reduce
"The Truth"
to an unsatisfying
collection
of closed, static, fixed, dry concepts and
beliefs.
The joy and the satisfaction in life come from being in the
conversation,
yes? The joy and the satisfaction in life, in other
words
come from having a say in the matter of our own lives.
"The Truth"
itself (the pure, the undiluted, the
"what's so")
is strangely neutral, unjoyous, and maddeningly dissatisfying
("a-satisfying" as in "asexual" may be the best way to
articulate this) - even when facets of it are well known and
clearly
understood.

Now
who we are,
it could be said, nevershows up
in
"The Truth"
ie
who we are
never
shows up
in
"The Answer"
- no matter how much and no matter how
intently
and no matter how fervently we seek it there. Where we
show up
rather, is in what we say about
"The Truth"
- or at least in the fact that we have something to say about it at
all in the first place. When you know it's you
who reduces the distinguished
"Truth"
to closed, static, fixed, dry concepts and
beliefs,
then a new
context
can become available in which it's likely that a
conversation
about
"The Truth"
can bear fruit, and not
devolve
into closed, static, fixed, dry concepts and
beliefs
... and ... be joyful and satisfying at the same
time.

But wait! There's yet moretrouble
in the land - in particular, with regard to
"The Answer".
It's this: there are at least a
thousandanswers
to any
question
about life which is worth asking. Yet somehow we have it rigged that
there's only one possible
"The Answer"
- so there are at least another nine hundred and ninety
nine perfectly decent other
answers
we miss. There are no smarts in settling for only
one
"The Answer"
when a great
question
can evoke a
thousand
great
answers.